This place is always packed and you have to make reservations for dinner. We’re usually only in the area when we’re foraging for dinner and drinks or headed to a movie so we’ve never even bothered to go inside. Yesterday, we happened to be killing a little time, looking for lunch before heading to the airport. The bar was empty when we walked in since the restaurant was just opening for the day. We were glad we did – it was awesomely tacky.

It was no Dinosaurland, though. You just can’t replicate that kind of roadside charm, but we enjoyed it anyway.

Whenever the “meteor shower” lightshow would start, the Pterodactyl, dinosaurs and mammoths (I know, I know) came to life and started roaring and pitching a fit. This was noisy. I’m betting even when the place is packed with children you can’t hear any of their fussing or screaming over the din, so that might be okay.

Husband and I are both certain that the dinosaur roars used on Land of the Lost for Big Alice and Grumpy’s vocalizations are part of the T-Rex Cafe soundscape, but I’m too lazy to look into it.

A giant octopus formed a canopy over the bar and it would periodically menace us with it’s tentacles. I never got any video of this, but it amused me every time.

Oh yeah, about those ghosts – I was the only one in the ladies room and I was standing at the sink washing my hands when the door to an empty stall suddenly slammed shut. It was probably a problem with an air conditioning vent or maybe an animatronic effect gone horribly wrong, but let’s chalk it up to ghosts just because we can.

5) It’s my favorite Tim Burton movie, with Alice in Wonderland probably running a close second.
6) Alice might be first. It does have Alan Rickman, after all.
7) The Blu-ray release of Nightmare is really beautiful.
8) Zero is one of my favorite movie ghosts.
9) I always liked Nightmare, but I fell in love with it when they re-released it into the theaters in 3D in 2007.
10) The Blu-ray of Nightmare has cool bonus features, including Vincent and Frankenweenie.
11) Alan Rickman was in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, but I wasn’t crazy about that one.
12) Alan Rickman.
13) What?
14) Where was I?
15) Is it warm in here?

Oh, nevermind.

(I just want to note that I originally embedded the official Disney trailer for the Blu-ray of Nightmare, but it was a promo for the special edition disk and, while it looked really cool and the image quality was better than what I found on youtube, I liked the original trailer better to kick off this post).

I’ve seen every episode of Supernatural way too many times. It’s not healthy, but I can’t control myself. I can’t even claim I can stop anytime, because that would be a lie.

It seemed wrong not to re-watch at least one ghost-centric episode this month specifically in honor of Ghost Month. (Ghost Month? Is that what I’m calling it? I keep getting confused. I’m tagging everything for 2010 31ghosts, by the way, in case you need to catch up).

I was having trouble deciding which episode to choose, so I let my Tivo, Overlord II, choose for me. The first episode it selected was…the first episode. It’s not bad for a pilot episode. Sam and Dean solve a mystery involving a woman in white, which in the show’s lore is a variation on the Latin American myth of La Llorona.

I was going to embed the opening scene from the episode, which is chock full of Supernatural mythology, but embedding is blocked. Here’s a link, instead.

I’m sure I have more to say about Supernatural and I’m sure there were better ghost episodes than this one, but Husband just walked in and we got distracted obsessing over Escape from Dinosaur Kingdom and I lost my train of thought.

I came upon this bit of information while trying to find a pattern for Danny’s Apollo 11 sweater. Husband wants me to make him one. It wouldn’t exactly be rocket science (sorry) to design one, but I’m lazy.

AMBER BENSON co-wrote and directed the animated web-series, Ghosts of Albion, (with Christopher Golden) for the BBC. The duo then novelized the series in two books for Random House. [edit]
As an actress, Benson spent three seasons as Tara Maclay on the cult show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She has also written, produced, and directed three feature films, including her latest, Drones, which she co-directed with Adam Busch and will be released later this year.

I included this bio in case you didn’t know who I meant. I liked this book a lot. If I hung out with any kids, I’d recommend it to them.

Sometimes I lose my mind while watching Scooby Doo and yell things at Husband like, “That’s why you don’t put a dog in charge of operating the outboard motor!” in a way that implies Husband was considering a such an action.

Sometimes Husband has to restrict my television time. Tonight’s one of those nights.

Most self-respecting Universities had quietly eliminated their Parapsychology departments long before I was even born.

Penn State has no self-respect, apparently. They not only had sanctioned student club called the “paranormal research society” in the last decade, but they let these students use the Penn State name in a reality series called Paranormal State. The students clearly identify themselves as “being from Penn State” when contacting people and so the University appears to have condoned a show where their students “investigate” hauntings, get their Jesus on in ways that would make Damien Karras cringe, and document their ghost-busting exploits for the camera.

I described the show to a friend and she said she doubted it would last very long. Then I told her it’s starting it’s FIFTH season. Then we both sat quietly for a few minutes.

Since it’s Ghost Month here at meanlouise.com, I thought I’d watch a whole season of Paranormal State while Husband was out doing his Superstar DJ thing.

I barely got through one episode.

You couldn’t pay me to watch a whole season of this show.

So here’s the thing, I don’t care if a reality show is a fabrication (as long as bystanders aren’t being taken advantage of on the show). I don’t think that the presence or absence of paranormal or ghost-hunting shows have any real impact on whether or not people believe in ghosts. (I do worry about people with The God encouraging parents to punish or in essence torture their children for behavioral or medical issues that they believe are demonic in nature. Whether this show supports that unfortunate worldview or encourages that kind of behavior, I can’t say. I didn’t get past the first episode, but I wanted to mention that troubling aspect to things like this before I move on. For more on that subject I’d suggest a book such as Michael Cuneo’s American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty).

What I do care about right at this particular moment is whether the show is good fun or entertaining or even remotely interesting. This show is none of those things. This show is the antithesis of those things. This show made me want to hit myself on the head with a hammer just because it would feel great when I stopped.

Plus it’s full of people praying the devil out of each other, and I don’t need to waste my valuable television-watching time on this. I can see that anytime I want by just riding public transportation.

Nevertheless, I decided to drive my truck around in the tubes of the interwebs and see what others had to say about the show.

Long Version: I pray to the FSM [flying spaghetti monster] that this show is, as one comma splicing Wikipedian claimed before a recent revision, that the show is, in fact, a Blair Witch style fiction. Beleving that there are people this fucking stupid out there who not only made it to college but then got a TV show all to themselves makes me just a tad homicidal.

The premise (hopefully fictional) is this: Penn State University has the country’s “only collegiate paranormal research society,” a claim I find completely dubious. Some douchebag (referred to hereafter as “Douchebag,” because I can’t be bothered to look up his name), the founder of said organization, only wants to help people who are haunted as he was haunted as a child. He is “searching for answers,” which, as usual in the “Unknown and unsolved” crowd, means he’s already found them.

Let me be completely candid: Douchebag and his buddies make Mario and Luigi from “Ghost Hunters” look like Neils Bohr and Alan Turing. Douchebag is an uber-serious, self-obsessed narcissist, their “methodologies” are more laughable than rods and orbs put together, and, to add insult to injury, they pray and spread around holy symbols like a fucking DnD cleric.

I think he actually makes it sound better than it is.

Variety points out that Paranormal State is brought to us by the same production team responsible for Laguna Beach. That’s quality.

The same excuse hardly applies to A&E, which continues to drift further toward TV’s dark side in its endeavors to entice younger viewers. Even with a regular pre-episode disclaimer, the channel lends credence to paranormal poppycock that consistently generates just enough of an audience to prompt every demo-chasing basic cabler to weigh in with its own straight-faced reality variation on the theme.

“We are students. We are seekers. And sometimes, we are warriors,” Buell says earnestly in the opening credits.

Far more interesting than the show itself is the website Paranormal State Illustrated which turns a critical eye on every episode of the show. This may sound like a ridiculous endeavor, but when you see how clearly disturbed some of the “clients” are and consider the emotional, psychological, financial or even physical harm that psychic scams can do to people, you realize that sites like Paranormal State Illustrated serve an important purpose.

I can’t find an official comment from Penn State about the show, but I did find this guardedly positive (in my opinion), news release from when the show’s star spoke on campus in 2009. Since this was a news release, presumably for wider distribution, and because things like this sometimes get archived in a way that makes deep-linking impossible, I’m going to take the liberty of pasting the whole thing so you can judge the tone for yourself.

Founder brings ‘Paranormal State’ to campus

October 15, 2009

The founder of the student Paranormal Research Society at Penn State University Park and now a producer and cast member of “Paranormal State” on the A&E Network, Ryan Buell recently brought his spirit-hunting message to Penn State Harrisburg.

Buell’s quest to examine and explain paranormal activity began when he was a child in his Sumter, S.C. home one night when he was in bed. He saw something standing in his doorway. “Its face was wide and it had a huge grin,” he recalls. His screams brought his mother to his room, but she saw nothing and went back to bed. Minutes later, “the thing rose up from the foot of my bed,” he said. All he got was a spanking from his mother.

That fear fostered a longtime fascination with things he can’t explain. During his sophomore year at Penn State, he started the Paranormal Research Society, a group of Penn State students and alumni who now travel the nation to investigate claims of paranormal activity.

That led to “Paranormal State” which premiered in December 2007 and now draws an estimated 3 million viewers. He explained that each episode features a different client – bar owner whose wine glasses won’t stay shelved; a young woman whose barn houses black mists; and a couple whose religious relics are burned without explanation.

“There are no official qualifications for being a paranormal investigator,” Buell said. “I’ve spent the last ten years training myself, working with highly regarded professionals in both the paranormal community and in other professions, [including] Catholic exorcists, law enforcement [and] psychologists, to become a well-rounded individual.”

During his presentation, Buell profiled the different types of spirits – ghosts, spirits, and poltergeists while listing for those in the audience typical signs of a haunting which include a sense of being watched, hearing voices, seeing things out of the corner of your eye, witnessing objects levitate and/or move, and even unusual odors.

He pointed out that formal paranormal investigation dates to 1882 in London with the creation of a society of research and spiritualism began in New York in 1848 with a pair of sisters.

He concluded with a series of reasons “spirits return” – unfinished business, to deliver information, to punish living enemies, to protect loved ones, and even the result of a painful or tragic death. And the comment that ghost hunting is “all in a day’s work for him and his cast members.”

I thought about calling Penn State for a comment, but then I realized I no longer cared enough to pick up the phone.

When I was in school we’d get calls from individuals wanting their hauntings documented – sometimes these calls ended up with us in the Physics Department. Confidentiality, and basic human decency, prevents me from blogging the conversations I had when I caught one of these calls, but I can tell you those were interesting days.

I watched Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining again. I’ve seen this movie a fair number of times but this is the first time I’ve seen a really good HD transfer of it. The richness of the colors was astonishing and the sound in 5.1? Way, way creepier than the terrible mixes I’ve heard in the past. I’ve always found the cinematography and the sound design impressive, but the vibrancy of the movie is stunning and you really should watch it on Blu-ray.

While I was watching the movie in my dimly-lit living room, I thought I saw something move in my peripheral vision. This is when I discovered that our television is now at exactly the right angle to reflect off of the glass doors of the bookcases that line the wall behind the couch. This discovery took several years off my life.

I backed up the movie and managed to get a fairly accurate photo of what I saw when i looked across the room. The demarcation of the television screen wasn’t as sharp in reality as it is in the picture so the effect was much creepier. You’ll just have to take my word for it.